I began this Saturday with my language lesson. We worked primarily on pronunciation, beginning consonants and tones. It requires placing the tongue behind the teeth and forward or back in unaccustomed ways when pronouncing English vocabulary. Steve likens the whole Chinese language speaking process to doing a puzzle. Selecting the right words, the proper tone, the proper pronunciation, the right word order and somehow assembling them altogether to ask or answer the question or make the point in a split second. It’s often after the situation is over that you figure out what you should have said! At times like this, learning Chinese seems overwhelming.
After my lesson I headed to Chinese Public Middle School No. 8, one of the top schools in the city. A misnomer really because it is a high school too and that is the reason why I was there. At the end of middle school, which is the end of ninth grade, Chinese students take an examination to determine which high school they are eligible to attend. Much emphasis is place on this exam and its results determine if you can attend a tier 1 or a tier 2 high school. This, in turn, will determine which tier college you will be able to attend. As you can imagine, both parents and students are very stressed about this and take the whole process very seriously.
The high schools throughout the city have open houses in the spring to showcase their programs to attract the best students, and in turn, the students and parents attend the open houses to learn what scores their students need to achieve in order to be successful applicants. Parents interview the teachers to understand their teaching style and success rate. Each student will apply to high school, listing their top choices. But there is a strategy involved. Within the tiers, the schools are further ranked so that there are different exam scores needed to attend the highest top 1 tier or the middle top 1 tier, for example. As I understand it, if you don’t make the score for your top choice, you automatically get placed in a lower tier. So, in essence, you really need to understand how you will score on this test and what scores are needed as you are making your high school selections to get into the highest tier school possible.
Anyway, our school, BCIS, has a relationship with Public School No. 8 and we were invited to attend their open house to offer our western IB education as an alternative for Chinese students who ultimately would like to attend colleges or universities in the West. This is a dicey decision for parents and students because once you attend a school like ours, you have pretty much have decided to preclude your options to attend a Chinese university. Chinese high school curriculum is geared to passing the Chinese college entrance exam and the western curriculums don’t include a lot of what is tested on that exam. Also, Chinese language proficiency would be an issue too since international school classes are taught in English, with only one class in Chinese per day. My understanding is that it could be done, but not very likely. On the other hand, if student wants to go to US, UK or Australia for college, the English skills they would acquire in a program like ours would enable them to apply to college without having to do intensive English studies between high school and college. It could be a win-win. BCIS gets top students and the Chinese students put themselves in a position to attend universities in the West.
My supervisor suggested I attend this event to learn about the Chinese system and she also thought some parents might want to speak English. Well, I did learn quite a bit but no parent really wanted to talk to me. In fact, they even asked my colleagues what I was doing there! (an interloper)
The format for these open houses is a reception room (large multi-purpose room in which tables are set up in a big square in the middle of the room, teachers seated by department in the middle of the square and parents huddled around the perimeter going from department to inquire about the curriculum and entry scores needed. We had a table on the perimeter of the room, apart from the school departments. We had a number of parents take our brochures and ask lots of questions, but I couldn’t get a sense of their interest because all of the conversation was in Chinese. My colleagues thought we might have one or two applicants to our school; that would be about it.
As we were leaving, a group of high school boys, whose assignment it was to give tours to potential students and parents, asked me if I wanted a tour. It was the end of the open house and they were probably both bored and curious about me and why I was there. I agreed to take the tour. My colleagues all left. I was glad I decided to stay. The boys were all very nice and clearly enjoyed showing off their school. I know that this school was not representative of the ordinary Chinese school; but, I would be curious to see how it compares to a place like Bronx Science or Peter Stuyvesant High School in New York. As you can see from the labs, they far exceed the facilities of most schools. I saw a physics demonstration and some experimental equipment that had been designed by their teacher for which he/she had won an award. Their pool and two gyms were used as training facilities for the Beijing Olympics and Olympic banners were hung proudly in these venues. The athletics facilities are open to the public on the weekends.
Public education is free but if the students board at the school, which many of them do, they do pay a fee. Some of my tour guides were commuters and some were boarders. They seemed to say the decision was based on how far they lived from school. Teachers live in the dorms with the students. I didn’t ask what percentage of the teachers were residents. In the end, I think they enjoyed the tour as much as I did!
On my way home, I encountered a lesson of another kind. I had seen this before but this time in the subway station. A manager or supervisor will line up the employees on the street, in front of their place of employment, in several rows and stand before them giving instructions, like a drill sergeant standing before his/her platoon. This time it was the supervisor of the subway clerks who handle security and ticket booth sales. They were in two rows, in their uniforms, standing at attention. Everyone looks very serious as they received their instructions for the shift for the week.
A day of learning for many.
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